Nailers are used to forcibly drive nails through floor boards to be fixed to a subfloor, among other uses. A floor board nailer of known construction is a rigid hand tool adapted to assist workers with a hammer to drive the nails. The nailer comprises a main heavy rigid frame with an elongated nail-carrying magazine to be disposed horizontally against the floor. An upright rigid column vertically extends in register with the front end of the nail magazine, towards which spring-loaded nails are continuously biased in the magazine. The nails are serially linked to one another with a conventional frangible joint, wherein a single planar body is formed from a plurality of nails. When the frontmost edgewise nail is hit to be vertically downwardly driven into a floor board, the frangible joint attaching it to the remaining section of the planar integral body of nails will shearingly detach, allowing the nail to be released and expelled from the nailer. The frontmost nail is positioned in vertical downward register with a vertically spaced driving rod which can be forcibly hit, e.g. with a hammer, to drive the nail through the floor board. A spring returns the driving rod into its upper resting position, spacedly over the frontmost nail, so that it be ready to hit the next nail in the same manner. The frontmost nail is guided from the magazine through a horizontal feed channel into the vertical driving channel in which the driving rod vertically slides. The frontmost nail abuts onto a front plate and is thus positioned in the driving channel, ready to be hit by the driving rod.
The nails conventionally used have an inverted L-shape, i.e. they have an elongated body which tapers into a pointed tip at their lower end, and they are elbowed at their upper end to define a perpendicularly extending head portion which provides a hammering surface on which the driving rod is to hit the nail. The nails are transversely thinner, and thus are prone to possibly accidentally transversely buckle, with a concurrent plastic deformation, when driven towards the ground, if they accidentally hit a non-drivable hard ground surface, such as another nail head flatly registering with the floorboard. Since the frontmost nail frontwardly abuts against the rigid front plate, it is thus supported against accidental frontward transversal twisting. However, it is likely that the nail elongated body will tilt or twist transversely rearwardly, i.e. towards the magazine and against the other nails, under impact of the nail tip on a hard surface. Indeed, when the nail is being expelled, if the nail tip portion hits a particularly hard surface, such as the nail head of another nail already driven through a floor board, the nail tip may be prevented from piercing this underlying hard surface, and the nail may tilt or buckle under the overhead pressure exerted by the driver rod, with the nail body twisting transversely rearwardly through the horizontal feed channel and into the nail magazine against the bias of the spring-loaded nails. The nail may either twist with concurrent plastic deformation, or it may simply rearwardly tilt, into the nail magazine. This is of course highly undesirable, since it may result in the nail feed channel becoming obstructed by the twisted frontmost nail, in addition to the nail being uselessly spent.